Lisa Gardner - Catch Me

D.D. and O exchanged glances, then made their way precariously down the icy sidewalk. The uniformed patrol officer had the passenger-side door open and was gesturing inside excitedly.

“On the dashboard,” he said urgently. “Don’t move it. I’d just set it there, you know, to deliver to the evidence room later. Course, I got the heat running, then when I looked in…”

It appeared to be the shooter’s note, now encased in clear plastic. A full sheet, the letters scripted in the familiar precisely formed, elegantly rounded letters. Except, as D.D. looked closer, she suddenly spotted other letters so small and jumbled together, they first appeared as a blemish or blur.

She looked up abruptly, glancing at the uniformed officer. “Did you touch this, mess with it in any way?”

She stood back, allowed O to take a look.

“No, no, no,” Officer Piotrow assured her hastily. “It’s the heat. When I saw that something seemed to have happened, I picked up the note, and I’ll be damned if the letters didn’t immediately disappear. But then I set the paper back down on the hot dash…”

D.D. felt her heart quicken.

“I think it’s lemon juice,” the officer was saying. “My kid did this experiment once in grade school. You can write secret notes with lemon juice-the words will disappear when the lemon juice dries, but reappear when you hold the note over a hot lightbulb. I think my dash is the lightbulb.”

“A note within a note,” Detective O murmured, still leaning over the paper. “Different penmanship.”

“Different sentiment,” D.D. replied tersely, chewing her lower lip.

The first note, Everyone dies sometime. Be brave , was scrawled in the usual large rounded script.

In contrast, the hidden message was much smaller, jumbled letters hastily scrawled and crammed into a space smaller than a dime.

An order. A taunt. Or maybe even a plea:

Two simple words: Catch Me .

HELLO. My name is Abigail.

Don’t worry, we’ve met.

Trust me, and I will take care of you.

Don’t you trust me?

Hello. My name is Abigail.

IT FELT GOOD TO HIT.

I liked the satisfying thwack of my gloved fist making hard contact with the heavy bag. I liked the feel of my front leg pivoting, my hips rotating, and my shoulder rolling as I snapped my entire body behind the blow. Jab, jab, jab, uppercut, roundhouse, feint left, left hook downstairs, left hook upstairs, second roundhouse, V-step right, jab left, punch right, dodge low, uppercut, repeat. Hit, move, hit harder, move faster. Hit.

Four thirty A.M. Pitch-black outside. Brutally cold. Definitely night, not day. All over the city, sane, well-adjusted people were snug in their beds, sound asleep.

I stood alone in the middle of a twenty-four-hour gym in Cambridge and pounded the crap out of the heavy bag. I’d been at it a bit. Long enough that my long brown hair was plastered to my head, I’d soaked through my quick-dry gym clothes, and my arms and legs were glazed in sweat. When I landed a particularly forceful blow, perspiration sprayed from my arms onto the blue mat.

I’m not a pretty girl-my figure is too gaunt, my face too harsh these days. But I’m strong, and in the wall of mirrors across from me, I took pride in the muscles rippling across my shoulders, the curve of my biceps, the fierce look on my face. If there were men in the gym right now, working their way through their own regimens, they’d feel a need to comment. Make light of my sweaty form, raise a brow at my go-for-broke style, ask me what his name was and what he did to make me so angry.

Even better reason for me to arrive at four in the morning, running from uneasy dreams and a screwed-up internal clock that wasn’t used to sleeping at night anyway.

Alone, I could hit as hard as I wanted to for as long as I wanted.

Alone, I didn’t have to apologize for being me.

Girls get a raw deal, I think. When boys brawl, tumble, tackle, it’s all boys will be boys. A little girl lashes out, and immediately it’s “Hands are for holding, hands are for hugging.”

Boys are encouraged to grow strong, to inspect their scrawny arms and thin chests for the first sign of muscular bulk. Girls, by the time they’re eight, are already overanalyzing their waistlines, worrying about the dreaded muffin top. We have no concept of gaining muscle, just an enduring aversion to gaining fat.

Girls are complimented on beauty, flexibility, and grace. But what about the upper body strength it takes to scramble up a tree, or the core muscles involved in swinging across the monkey bars? Young girls perform natural feats of strength on parks and playgrounds all across the country. Parents rarely comment, however, and eventually girls spend more and more time trying to look pretty, which does earn them praise.

Until recently, I wasn’t any different.

I had to learn my aggression the hard way. Through practice and repetition and painful reinforcement. By experiencing the cracking neck pain that follows an uppercut to the chin, or the immediate eye-welling sensation of taking a fist to the nose. Pain, I discovered, was fleeting. While the satisfaction of standing my ground, then retaliating fiercely, lasted all afternoon.

I had to learn to go deep inside myself, to a tiny place that had managed to survive all those years with my mother, a place where I could finally stop apologizing and start fighting back.

Around the fourth month of boxing, I happened to catch my reflection in the mirror. I noticed lines in my shoulders, curves on my back. Muscles. From fifty push-ups every morning and every night. From jump roping and heavy bag intervals and speed bag drills. From tripling my daily intake of protein, because for all of my philosophizing, boys are different than girls. They start with more muscle mass, add to it more efficiently, and retain it more effortlessly. Meaning if I wanted to bulk up, I had to eat, eat, eat. Egg whites and chicken sausage, six ounces of boneless chicken breast, six ounces of fish, protein shakes supplemented with peanut butter, plain Greek yogurt supplemented with protein powder.

Eventually my boxing coach moved me on to “tire work.” Big heavy tractor tires. I sledgehammered them, flipped them, jumped on top of them. By the six-month mark, I’d both leaned down and filled out. People stared at my arms when I went out in public. Teenage boys took notice of the way I moved, granted me more space on a crowded subway. Men looked me in the eye with a bit more respect.

And I liked it. Physical pain is nothing, I’ve realized. It’s letting go of your fear, finding your rage, and feeling strong that make the difference.

Unless it’s 2 A.M., and you’re dreaming of a baby who couldn’t have existed, or your homicidal mother who certainly did, or Stan Miller and the iron spikes protruding from his bloody chest.

Did killing someone make me a badass? Or did it take more courage to continue pounding the heavy bag while my own hollowed-out face mocked me in the far mirror?

I worked the bag for another thirty minutes. Next, I hit the weight machines. Then the StairMaster, followed by jump roping. This was it, my final workout before my once-in-a-lifetime main event. The next thirty-eight hours would be spent on rest and recovery. Like a professional athlete, I would take the final two days before the marathon off. Gotta be fresh for 8 P.M. Saturday. Gotta be ready.

Six A.M., people started arriving, beginning their own daily rituals. I left them behind, staggering into the locker room, where I headed straight into a hot, steamy shower.

I stood there a long time, soaking exhausted muscles.

And I wondered, if I was so strong, if I’d made so much progress in the past year, why was I still so terrified of a baby girl named Abigail?